June 2, 2011 -
The City of Knoxville Solid Waste Office is sponsoring a Curbside Recycling Sign Up Event on Saturday, June 11th from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the West Town Mall parking lot near the Morrell Road entrance.

This one-day event will allow City residents who currently receive weekly City trash pickup service to sign up for it's free curbside recycling program.

The first 1000 residents to sign up Saturday will receive a free in home recycling bin sponsored by the Alcoa Foundation and Keep Knoxville Beautiful. This is a first-come, first-serve promotion while the bin supplies last.

"We are offering the in home recycling bins to encourage residents to come out and sign up for the program on Saturday" said John Homa, City of Knoxville Solid Waste Project Manager. "But, residents can also sign up on the web at www.doyourpartwiththecart.com or by calling our 311 service center. The new City Curbside Recycling program is at no cost to city residents. The service is scheduled to start on October 1st of this year.

The single-stream, curbside recycling program makes recycling as easy as throwing away trash since city residents will no longer have to separate recyclable items. Instead they simply place the recyclable materials into a single container, supplied by the city that will be picked up every two weeks by the city's contractor.

As of Thursday afternoon 8,567 households had signed up for the curbside recycling program. Another 3,323 Knoxville residents who are customers of the Waste Connections curbside recycling program are automatically included in the new free program. That raises the total number of households in the city that are signed up for the program to 11,890.

The city has been working for several years to develop a city-wide curbside recycling program in response to citizen requests for it and to reduce the amount of material going into the landfill.

In addition to the City Solid Waste Office, Alcoa, and Keep Knoxville Beautiful other partners of the event include Curved Edge Marketing, Best Buy, West Town Mall, WBIR, Toter Inc., Waste Connections and Rock-Tenn Recycling.

Citizens can learn more about the program or sign up for it by visiting www.doyourpartwiththecart.com. They can also sign up by simply calling 311 or 215-4311.